Les Misérables
by Zantana
Summary: Bella IS Éponine. Follow my version of Les Misérables, with elements of Twilight. Bella Éponine's a confused teenage girl who is caught between the romance of Cosette and Marius, but her mind wants Marius, but her heart yearns for another. Bella Éponine/ Demetri. Starts from the beginning of Les Mis, and ends at the end. On a HIATUS!
1. Chapter 1

**Les Misérables**

**Isabella / Demetri Volturi**

**Rated M for a Reason  
Bella IS Éponine. My recreation of the tale of Les Misérables, with elements of Twilight mixed in. **

**Even if you don't know the storyline of Les Misérables, you can understand it through here. I will explain the basics through this story. **

**Enjoy, this combines elements of the novel and musical of Les Misérables.**

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~ France, 1815 ~

Jean Valjean was an honorable man. His mother and father had both died when he was young, leaving Jean Valjean with the only family he had left, an older sister who was a widow with seven children. She was the one to bring up her younger brother, until her husband had died. Her eldest child was only eight, the youngest was one.

Jean was 25 at the time of his brother in law's death, so he took responsibility. He worked to support his sister and her children, and he did his job diligently. He never had time for silly things such as love.

He spent his days in weariness, and his food would always be split up to go to the hungered children. Throughout the seasons, he would have numerous jobs, but one winter there was no bread left for the family.

Jean Valjean took action, an action that would severely change his life as he knew it.

The baker down the road jolted up at the smashing sound at the dead of the night. He cautiously made his way to the kitchen, where he saw an arm making its way through the glass. The baker followed the thief in haste, and managed to catch up to him. The thief was Jean Valjean, who only wanted to feed his sister's family.

Jean Valjean was taken away for his theft and break in. He was put on trial, and was found guilty, so he was sentenced five years into the galleys.

A year later, a gang of galley slaves was put into chains after the 1796 victory of Montenotte, won by the chief in command of the Italian army. Jean Valjean was one of the imprisoned slaves, and he was taken away to nearby Toulon, and spent 27 days on a cart, a chain on his neck, showing his slavery.

When he arrived to Touson, he was given a red cassock. He was no longer Jean Valjean, no, he was slave number 24601. A man with no honor, and dignity. He lived the life of the slave now, for nineteen years in imprisonment. He spent his days wondering if his sister and her children were out on the streets, starving to death back home.

It was years later when he heard whispers about his beloved sister. It was rumored she lived on one of the poorest streets of Paris, but she only had her youngest child with her. At the end of his fourth year, Jean escaped from captivity, but he was caught, and condemned another 19 years after a series of events.

That was in 1795, now it has been exactly nineteen years since that event occurred.

It was an average day, and the slaves were ordered to pull in a ship of goods. There were no winds to guide it to shore, so now the slaves must do their duty.

Jean Valjean went to do his duty numbly, and he cringed at the cool waters of the river. The cries of the slaves echoed through the channel of water as they pulled the ropes attached to the ship. Valjean could barely feel his arms as he robotically pulled at the ropes.

"Look down. Don't look 'em in the eye. Look down, look down. You'll always be a slave!" The slaves' eerie cries echoed throughout the channel, and Jean looks up. He saw an inspector in blue watching them, but he didn't care anymore. Jean felt like his duty was never going too finished at this rate.

"The sun is strong. It's as hot as hell below." A slave commented from the side, and many nodded their agreement.

"Look down, look down, there's twenty years to go…." Another slave said, with his tone angry and mournful as he pulled the ropes angrily.

"I've done no wrong! Sweet Jesus, hear my prayer!" Another slave cried out, and blood was pouring from his hands. Tears streamed down his face, no doubt from the salt water.

"Look down look down, sweet Jesus doesn't care." Another slave reprimanded him as he continued to pull determinedly at the ropes.

"How long, oh Lord…Before you let me die?" A slave moaned from his spot after the ship was pulled in. The slaves lined up to go to their lodging, which was filthy and rat infested.  
As Jean Valjean was about to enter it, the guard in blue stopped him.

"Go get the flag." Was all he said as he watched the lone slave's shoulders slump. Jean went and lifted the huge pole; French flag attached, and dragged it to the man.

He dropped at his feet, and the man eyed with distaste.

"Prisoner 24601, your time is up, and your parole has begun. You know what this means." He stated, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Yes, it means I'm free!" Jean Valjean exclaimed with excitement. He was finally going to escape this hell!

"No! It means you get your yellow ticket-of-leave. You are a thief!" The guard stated as he pulled out a piece of paper, it had Jean Valjean's true identity and records written on it in French.

"I stole a loaf of bread!" Jean protested, his eyes narrowed in anger.

"You robbed a house!" The guard retorted, it was evident he respected the law greatly.

"I broke a window pane. My sister's children were close to death, and we were all starving!" Jean protested once more, trying to clear his actions. But the guard wouldn't take any of it.

"And you will starve again, unless you learn the meaning of the law."  
"I know the meaning of those 19 years a slave of the law!" Jean yelled, angered that his sister's children had to suffer all of these years.

"Five years for what you did, the rest because you tried to run. Yes, 24601."

"My name is Jean Valjean." Jean said, as he prepared to leave the damned once more.

"And I am Javert! Do not forget my name, 24601." Javert called after him, and eyed him as he left. He was sure that this man was going to be the source of many problems in the future.

Jean Valjean tasted the freedom on his lips. It felt so good, something he would savor.

But that little yellow paper prevented him from ever gaining a job, so he had to become a thief within the night time.

As he wandered the streets, jobless and homeless, a kind man let him in. He was a Bishop, of the religion of Christianity. He fed Valjean, and gave him a place to stay. Jean took this offer, but committed a sin almost immediately that night. He took all the silver he could carry, and fled the scene, where the bishop had lived.

The next day, he found himself on his knees in front of the bishop, armed forces behind him. A wound on the side of his head was bleeding, and the blood dripped to the wooden floor below.

"This man stole your silver." The one guard said, jabbing the end of his gun at Jean. Jean ignored the dripping blood, and stared at the bishop guiltily. He knew he shouldn't have committed such a crime, but he wanted to live. Jean Valjean was finally free, but now he could be back in chains. One simple action took him back to the reason he was enslaved by the French guards.

"No, I gave them to him. But my friend, you forgot my last gift. Take these silver candles you left behind!" The Bishop said as he put them into Jean's hands, and he stared bewildered at the older man. The guards left, and the Bishop knelt next to Jean.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air. He couldn't comprehend why the elderly bishop would give him such precious objects. He saw the women staring at with distaste from their spots, but he could only comprehend what the bishop was saying.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night."

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:-

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything of this magnitude, remained speechless in shock. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity,

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."

Jean fled the room, and then the town as fast as he could after thanking the older man. His thoughts whirled, spinning mercilessly. The yellow passport in his pocket seemed to burn a hole in the leather cloak, as his dirty and weary feet continued to move forward.

When moving onto the next town, he committed a sin. He stole a boy's coin, but immediately felt guilty afterwards. It would have been enough for the police to arrest him once more if they were in the vicinity. As he expected, he was reported, and he fled the town in terror.

Jean Valjean knew it; he could feel it in his old and weary bones. The Bishop's words echoed in his head, and he made an immediate decision. He was going to cleanse his soul once and for all.

He took the little yellow paper that forever damned his soul in his hands, and ripped it to pieces.

Jean Valjean was going to make a change in his life.

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~ Same Year, Montfermeil ~

There was, at Montfermeil, near Paris, during the first quarter of this century, a sort of cook-shop which no longer exists. This cook-shop was kept by some people named Thenardier, husband and wife. It was situated in Boulanger Lane. Over the door there was a board nailed flat against the wall. Upon this board was painted something which resembled a man carrying another man on his back, the latter wearing the big gilt epaulettes of a general, with large silver stars; red spots represented blood; the rest of the picture consisted of smoke, and probably represented a battle. Below ran this inscription: AT THE SIGN OF SERGEANT OF WATERLOO (Au Sargent de Waterloo).

Nothing is more common than a cart or a truck at the door of a hostelry. Nevertheless, the vehicle, or, to speak more accurately, the fragment of a vehicle, which encumbered the street in front of the cook-shop of the Sergeant of Waterloo, one evening in the spring of 1818, would certainly have attracted, by its mass, the attention of any painter who had passed that way.

It was the fore-carriage of one of those trucks which are used in wooded tracts of country, and which serve to transport thick planks and the trunks of trees. This fore-carriage was composed of a massive iron axle-tree with a pivot, into which was fitted a heavy shaft, and which was supported by two huge wheels. The whole thing was compact, overwhelming, and misshapen. It seemed like the gun-carriage of an enormous cannon. The ruts of the road had bestowed on the wheels, the fellies, the hub, the axle, and the shaft, a layer of mud, a hideous yellowish daubing hue, tolerably like that with which people are fond of ornamenting cathedrals. The wood was disappearing under mud, and the iron beneath rust. Under the axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain, worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with it, and Shakespeare, Caliban.

Why was that fore-carriage of a truck in that place in the street? In the first place, to encumber the street; next, in order that it might finish the process of rusting. There is a throng of institutions in the old social order, which one comes across in this fashion as one walks about outdoors, and which have no other reasons for existence than the above.

The center of the chain swung very near the ground in the middle, and in the loop, as in the rope of a swing, there were seated and grouped, on that particular evening, in exquisite interlacement, two little girls; one about two years and a half old, the other, eighteen months; the younger in the arms of the other. A handkerchief, cleverly knotted about them, prevented their falling out. A mother had caught sight of that frightful chain, and had said, "Come! there's a plaything for my children."

The two children, who were dressed prettily and with some elegance, were radiant with pleasure; one would have said that they were two roses amid old iron; their eyes were a triumph; their fresh cheeks were full of laughter. One had chestnut hair; the other, brown. Their innocent faces were two delighted surprises; a blossoming shrub which grew near wafted to the passers-by perfumes which seemed to emanate from them; the child of eighteen months displayed her pretty little bare stomach with the chaste indecency of childhood. Above and around these two delicate heads, all made of happiness and steeped in light, the gigantic fore-carriage, black with rust, almost terrible, all entangled in curves and wild angles, rose in a vault, like the entrance of a cavern. A few paces apart, crouching down upon the threshold of the hostelry, the mother, not a very prepossessing woman, by the way, though touching at that moment, was swinging the two children by means of a long cord, watching them carefully, for fear of accidents, with that animal and celestial expression which is peculiar to maternity. At every backward and forward swing the hideous links emitted a strident sound, which resembled a cry of rage; the little girls were in ecstasies; the setting sun mingled in this joy, and nothing could be more charming than this caprice of chance which had made of a chain of Titans the swing of cherubim.

As she rocked her little ones, the mother hummed in a discordant voice a romance then celebrated, "It must be, said a warrior."

Her song, and the contemplation of her daughters, prevented her hearing and seeing what was going on in the street.

In the meantime, someone had approached her, as she was beginning the first couplet of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying very near her ear, "You have two beautiful children there, Madame."

"To the fair and tender Imogene." replied the mother, continuing her romance; then she turned her head.

A woman stood before her, a few paces distant. This woman also had a child, which she carried in her arms.

She was carrying, in addition, a large carpet-bag, which seemed very heavy.

This woman's child was one of the most divine creatures that it is possible to behold. It was a girl, two or three years of age. She could have entered into competition with the two other little ones, so far as the coquetry of her dress was concerned; she wore a cap of fine linen, ribbons on her bodice, and Valenciennes lace on her cap. The folds of her skirt were raised so as to permit a view of her white, firm, and dimpled leg. She was admirably rosy and healthy. The little beauty inspired a desire to take a bite from the apples of her cheeks. Of her eyes nothing could be known, except that they must be very large, and that they had magnificent lashes. She was asleep.

She slept with that slumber of absolute confidence peculiar to her age. The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep profoundly.

As for the mother, her appearance was sad and poverty-stricken. She was dressed like a working-woman who is inclined to turn into a peasant again. She was young. Was she handsome? Perhaps; but in that attire it was not apparent. Her hair, a golden lock of which had escaped, seemed very thick, but was severely concealed beneath an ugly, tight, close, nun-like cap, tied under the chin. A smile displays beautiful teeth when one has them; but she did not smile. Her eyes did not seem to have been dry for a very long time. She was pale; she had a very weary and rather sickly appearance. She gazed upon her daughter asleep in her arms with the air peculiar to a mother who has nursed her own child. A large blue handkerchief, such as the Invalides use, was folded into a fichu, and concealed her figure clumsily. Her hands were sunburnt and all dotted with freckles, her forefinger was hardened and lacerated with the needle; she wore a cloak of coarse brown woolen stuff, a linen gown, and coarse shoes.

This woman was known as Fantine. She was abandoned by the man she loved to care for her child. Her three friends had also suffered the same fates, but they didn't have a child to look after to. She had sacrificed much for her daughter, Cosette, to survive in this harsh world.

"My name is Madame Thénardier," said the mother of the two little girls."We keep this inn."

Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between her teeth, "It must be so; I am a knight, and I am off to Palestine."

This Madame Thénardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and angular- the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead of standing erect-destinies hang upon such a thing as that.

The traveler told her story, with slight modifications added to it.

That she was a working-woman; that her husband was dead; that her work in Paris had failed her, and that she was on her way to seek it elsewhere, in her own native parts; that she had left Paris that morning on foot; that, as she was carrying her child, and felt fatigued, she had got into the Villemomble coach when she met it; that from Villemomble she had come to Montfermeil on foot; that the little one had walked a little, but not much, because she was so young, and that she had been obliged to take her up, and the jewel had fallen asleep.

At this word she bestowed on her daughter a passionate kiss, which woke her. The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother's, and looked at-what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in the presence of our twilight of virtue. One would say that they feel themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men. Then the child began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she slipped to the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being which wished to run. All at once she caught sight of the two others in the swing, stopped short, and put out her tongue, in sign of admiration.

Mother Thénardier released her daughters, made them descend from the swing, and said, "Now amuse yourselves, all three of you."

Children become acquainted quickly at that age, and at the expiration of a minute the little Thénardiers were playing with the new-comer at making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure.

The new-comer was very gay; the goodness of the mother is written in the gayety of the child; she had seized a scrap of wood which served her for a shovel, and energetically dug a cavity big enough for a fly. The grave-digger's business becomes a subject for laughter when performed by a child.

The two women pursued their chat.

"What is your little one's name?" Madame Thénardier questioned, trying to get more information out of this woman.

"Cosette." Fantine said vaguely, she didn't bother giving a surname to the woman.

For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The child's name was Euphrasie. But out of Euphrasie the mother had made Cosette by that sweet and graceful instinct of mothers and of the populace which changes Josepha into Pepita, and Francoise into Sillette. It is a sort of derivative which disarranges and disconcerts the whole science of etymologists. We have known a grandmother who succeeded in turning Theodore into Gnon.

"How old is she?" Madame Thénardier questioned curiously.

"She is going on three." Fantine responded quietly, lost in memories of her past.

"That is the age of my eldest, Isabella Éponine Thénardier." Madame Thénardier stated proudly.

In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in ecstasies over it.

Their radiant brows touched each other; one would have said that there were three heads in one aureole.

"How easily children get acquainted at once!" exclaimed Mother Thénardier; "one would swear that they were three sisters!"

This remark was probably the spark which the other mother had been waiting for. She seized the Thénardier's hand, looked at her fixedly, and said, "Will you keep my child for me?"

The Thénardier made one of those movements of surprise which signify neither assent nor refusal at the same time.

Cosette's mother continued, "You see, I cannot take my daughter to the country. My work will not permit it. With a child one can find no situation. People are ridiculous in the country. It was the good God who caused me to pass your inn. When I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean, and so happy, it overwhelmed me. I said: `Here is a good mother. That is just the thing; that will make three sisters.' And then, it will not be long before I return. Will you keep my child for me?"

"I must see about it," replied the Thénardier, thinking about the possibilities that could occur.

"I will give you six francs a month." Fantine offered desperately, she needed someone to watch her darling Cosette.

"Here a man's voice called from the depths of the cook-shop, "Not for less than seven francs. And six months paid in advance."

"Six times seven makes forty-two," said the Thénardier.

"I will give it," said the mother, who was somewhat relieved at this offer.

"And fifteen francs in addition for preliminary expenses," added the man's voice.

"Total, fifty-seven francs," said Madame Thénardier. And she hummed vaguely, with these figures, "It must be, said a warrior."

"I will pay it," said the mother. "I have eighty francs. I shall have enough left to reach the country, by travelling on foot. I shall earn money there, and as soon as I have a little I will return for my darling."

The man's voice resumed, "The little one has an outfit?"

"That is my husband," said the Thénardier with a loving smile.

"Of course she has an outfit, the poor treasure.-I understood perfectly that it was your husband.-And a beautiful outfit, too! A senseless outfit, everything by the dozen, and silk gowns like a lady. It is here, in my carpet-bag." Fantine said, as she motioned towards the bag now lying limply at her side.

"You must hand it over," struck in the man's voice again, a taunting edge in it.

"Of course I shall give it to you," said the mother. "It would be very queer if I were to leave my daughter quite naked!" She exclaimed, almost as if it were a crime not to.

The master's face appeared, and his red hair and green eyes were bright in the sunlight.

"That's good," said he. The bargain was concluded in that minute. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave up her money and left her child, fastened her carpet-bag once more, now reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon. People arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs in reality!

A neighbor of the Thénardiers met this mother as she was setting out, and came back with the remark, "I have just seen a woman crying in the street so that it was enough to rend your heart."

When Cosette's mother had taken her departure, the man said to the woman, "That will serve to pay my note for one hundred and ten francs which falls due tomorrow; I lacked fifty francs. Do you know that I should have had a bailiff and a protest after me? You played the mouse-trap nicely with your young ones."

"Without suspecting it," said the woman with a somewhat smug smile.

Without knowing it, Fantine had just set herself and her daughter Cosette into a dangerous game of the cat and mouse.

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**A/N: Please read and review. **

**I hope everyone enjoyed this! ^_^ **


	2. Chapter 2

The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Who were these Thénardiers exactly?

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the class denominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.

They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and woman possessed such souls.

Thénardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening in front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing them utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse of somber secrets in their past and of somber mysteries in their future.

This Thénardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier- a sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815, and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after having been Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska, still noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame Thenardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said in his jargon-a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magaera began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thénardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest daughter was named Isabella Éponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore the name of Azelma.

However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the name of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte-if there are still any vicomtes-to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This displacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and the rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality. The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a profound thing, the French Revolution.

It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The cook-shop was in a bad way after all of these years. The Thénardiers were slowly spiraling into their dooms.

Thanks to the traveler's, Fantine's, fifty-seven francs, Thénardier had been able to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month they were again in need of money, so they did what they could possible. The woman took Cosette's outfit to Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon as that sum was spent, the Thénardiers grew accustomed to look on the little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity; and they treated her accordingly. As she had no loner any clothes, they dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thénardier brats; that is to say, in rags. Isabella and Azelma wore the finest clothing in town, but poor little Cosette had to suffer.

They fed her on what all the rest had left-a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat. Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions; Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to theirs. She would often be kicked by Isabella, who seemed to understand what was going on with the girl her age.

The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at M. sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter every month, that she might have news of her child. The Thénardiers replied invariably, "Cosette is doing wonderfully well."

It was a lie of course, but Fantine didn't need to know that. After all, the poor woman was the cash cow for the Thénardiers.

At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when Thénardiers said: "A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she expect us to do with her seven francs?" and he wrote to demand twelve francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her child was happy, "and was coming on well," submitted, and forwarded the twelve francs. Fantine didn't need to know the truth, as long as the Thénardiers got their francs in the end.

Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other. Mother Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her to hate the stranger who had left her the child known as Cosette. Cosette was like a foreigner, similar to those inferior non-whites.

It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to her as though it was taken from her own, and that that little child diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to her. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Caresses of tenderness and love, both of which her daughters loved to receive greatly, but Cosette was forever denied of.

Cosette could not make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble being, who should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!

Madame Thénardier was vicious with Cosette. Isabella Éponine and Azelma were vicious as well, because that was they had known. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size is smaller; that is all. Isabella never felt guilty for what she did, nor not even had second thoughts of it, nor did Azelma.

A year passed; then another. Nothing changed as the scenery and weather patterns changed.

People in the village said, "Those Thénardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"

They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her after all these years, and had abandoned her with the good Thénardiers.

In the meanwhile, Thénardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send her away. "Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase." The mother paid the fifteen francs, while she worried and fretted over her child's conditions.

From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness, or at least in the Thénardiers' eyes.

As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say, before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the household. Isabella Éponine used this for her advantage, often making the poor child do her own chores and household objectives. Isabella never felt guilty, as this girl was inferior to her.

Five years old! The reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! It is true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world, "worked for his living and stole"?

Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard, the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thénardiers considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner, since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in her payments. Some months she was in arrears.

If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an indescribably uneasy look. "The sly creature," said the Thénardiers.

Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because, large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still larger amount of sadness.

It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes, sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.

She was called the Lark in the neighborhood. The populace, who are fond of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name on this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger than a bird, which was awake every morning before anyone else in the house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before daybreak.

Only the little lark never sang again. She lived watching Azelma and Isabella Éponine play with other children, and having beautiful china dolls. Cosette only had a ratty straw doll she had made herself, and her rag clothing.

And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was she? What was she doing?

After leaving her little Cosette with the Thénardiers, she had continued her journey, and had reached M. sur M.

This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.

Fantine had quitted her province ten years before. M. sur M. had changed its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.

About two years previously one of those industrial facts which are the grand events of small districts had taken place.

This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop it at length; we should almost say, to underline it.

From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place in the production of "black goods." Towards the close of 1815 a man, a stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin, and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron.

This very small change had affected a revolution in this time and age.

This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which was a benefit to the manufacturer.

Thus three results ensued from one idea, and the man continued to prosper from his ideas.

In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich, which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better. He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known; of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.

It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside. Though none had known of the man's past, he had become the richest man in the land, except for the king himself.

On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance, and the language of a workingman. Now he was a wealthy man rising through the ranks, breaking through the social classes and barriers built around him. It was much more different than the man's past, a dark and dirty past that he could have killed for if he told a soul.

It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening, knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out in the town-hall.

This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his passport. Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father Madeleine, and he was new to town.

He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and who was good. That was all that could be said about him, as no one knew much more about him.

Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably re-constructed, M. sur M. had become a rather important center of trade. Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases there each year. M. sur M. almost rivalled London and Berlin in this branch of commerce.

Father Madeleine's profits were such, that at the end of the second year he was able to erect a large factory, in which there were two vast workrooms, one for the men, and the other for women. Anyone who was hungry could present himself there, and was sure of finding employment and bread. Father Madeleine required of the men good will, of the women pure morals, and of all, probity. He had separated the work-rooms in order to separate the sexes, and so that the women and girls might remain discreet.

On this point he was inflexible. It was the only thing in which he was in a manner intolerant. He was all the more firmly set on this severity, since M. sur M., being a garrison town, opportunities for corruption abounded. However, his coming had been a boon, and his presence was a godsend. Before Father Madeleine's arrival, everything had languished in the country; now everything lived with a healthy life of toil. A strong circulation warmed everything and penetrated everywhere.

Slack seasons and wretchedness were unknown. There was no pocket so obscure that it had not a little money in it; no dwelling so lowly that there was not some little joy within it. This was much different than what had happened before Father Madeleine had come to the land.

Father Madeleine gave employment to everyone. He exacted but one thing: Be an honest man. Be an honest woman. He claimed to follow the words and actions a wise man once told him, of to act in kindness of God to everyone who is not as fortunate.

As we have said, in the midst of this activity of which he was the cause and the pivot, Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular thing in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were his chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of himself. In 1820 he was known to have a sum of six hundred and thirty thousand francs lodged in his name with Laffitte; but before reserving these six hundred and thirty thousand francs, he had spent more than a million for the town and it's poor.

The hospital was badly endowed; he founded six beds there. M. sur M. is divided into the upper and the lower town. The lower town, in which he lived, had but one school, a miserable hovel, which was falling to ruin: he constructed two, one for girls, and the other for boys

. He allotted a salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as large as their meager official salary, and one day he said to someone who expressed surprise, "The two prime functionaries of the state are the nurse and the schoolmaster." He created at his own expense an infant school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding old and infirm workmen. As his factory was a center, a new quarter, in which there were a good many indigent families, rose rapidly around him; he established there a free dispensary.

At first, when they watched his beginnings, the good souls said, "He's a jolly fellow who means to get rich." When they saw him enriching the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, "He is an ambitious man."

This seemed all the more probable since the man was religious, and even practiced his own religion to a certain degree, a thing which was very favorably viewed at that epoch. He went regularly to low mass every Sunday, and became a regular to the folks there. The local deputy, who nosed out all rivalry everywhere, soon began to grow uneasy over this religion. This deputy had been a member of the legislative body of the Empire, and shared the religious ideas of a father of the Oratoire, known under the name of Fouche, Duc d'Otrante, whose creature and friend he had been. He indulged in gentle raillery at God with closed doors. But when he beheld the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going to low mass at seven o'clock, he perceived in him a possible candidate, and resolved to outdo him; he took a Jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and to vespers.

Ambition was at that time, in the direct acceptation of the word, a race to the steeple. The poor profited by this terror as well as the good God, for the honorable deputy also founded two beds in the hospital, which made twelve.

Nevertheless, in 1819 a rumor one morning circulated through the town to the effect that, on the representations of the prefect and in consideration of the services rendered by him to the country, Father Madeleine was to be appointed by the King, mayor of M. sur M.

Those who had pronounced this new-comer to be "an ambitious fellow," seized with delight on this opportunity which all men desire, to exclaim, "There! What did we say?" All M. sur M. was in an uproar. The rumor was well founded, and many believed it to be true. And Several days later the appointment appeared in the Moniteur. On the following day Father Madeleine refused to become the honored mayor of the small town.

In this same year of 1819 the products of the new process invented by Madeleine figured in the industrial exhibition; when the jury made their report, the King appointed the inventor a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. A fresh excitement in the little town, an excitement for their future and for Father Madeleine. Well, so it was the cross that he wanted! Father Madeleine refused the cross as well though, much to the peoples despair.

Decidedly this man was an enigma. The good souls got out of their predicament by saying, "After all, he is some sort of an adventurer." Negative words were never uttered about Father Madeleine, everyone liked the man for what he did for the people.

We have seen that the country owed much to him; the poor owed him everything; he was so useful and he was so gentle that people had been obliged to honor and respect him. His workmen, in particular, adored him, and he endured this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity.

When he was known to be rich, "people in society" bowed to him, and he received invitations in the town; he was called, in town, Monsieur Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him. "Society" claimed him for its own.

The prim little drawing-rooms on M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan, opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionaire. They made a thousand advances to him. He refused to take any of them.

This time the good gossips had no trouble. "He is an ignorant man, of no education. No one knows where he came from. He would not know how to behave in society. It has not been absolutely proved that he knows how to read." Oh how they were right and wrong in so many ways.

When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business." When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a brute."

In 1820, five years after his arrival in M. sur M., the services which he had rendered to the district were so dazzling; the opinion of the whole country round about was so unanimous, that the King again appointed him mayor of the town. He again declined; but the prefect resisted his refusal, all the notabilities of the place came to implore him, the people in the street besought him; the urging was so vigorous that he ended by accepting. It was noticed that the thing which seemed chiefly to bring him to a decision was the almost irritated apostrophe addressed to him by an old woman of the people, who called to him from her threshold, in an angry way: "A good mayor is a useful thing. Is he drawing back before the good which he can do?"

This was the third phase of his ascent. Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine. Monsieur Madeleine became Monsieur le Maire.

On the other hand, he remained as simple as on the first day. He had gray hair, a serious eye, the sunburned complexion of a laborer, the thoughtful visage of a philosopher. He habitually wore a hat with a wide brim, and a long coat of coarse cloth, buttoned to the chin. He fulfilled his duties as mayor; but, with that exception, he lived in solitude. He spoke to but few people. He avoided polite attentions; he escaped quickly; he smiled to relieve himself of the necessity of talking; he gave, in order to get rid of the necessity for smiling, the women said of him, "What a good-natured bear!" His pleasure consisted in strolling in the fields.

He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he read. He had a well-selected little library. He loved books; books are cold but safe friends. In proportion as leisure came to him with fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind. It had been observed that, ever since his arrival at M. sur M.

His language had grown more polished, more choice, and more gentle with every passing year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his strolls, but he rarely made use of it. When he did happen to do so, his shooting was something so infallible as to inspire terror. He never killed an inoffensive animal. He never shot at a little bird. Madeleine was a saint in many ways to the people of France, but he was different in the harsh reality he hid behind.

Although he was no longer young, it was thought that he was still prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance to anyone who was in need of it, lifted a horse, released a wheel clogged in the mud, or stopped a runaway bull by the horns. He always had his pockets full of money when he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after him, and surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.

It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life, since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in the houses.

He had "recipes" for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail, and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed in it.

One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles; he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said: "They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibers like hemp and flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle.

The seed of the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter. Moreover, it is excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How many men resemble the nettle?" He added, after a pause: "Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators."

The children loved him because he knew how to make charming little trifles of straw and cocoanuts. The parents couldn't help but to wonder how he did it, only the slaves of Touson knew how to do that, but they would be ignorant to the truth of Monsieur Madeleine.

When he saw the door of a church hung in black, he entered: he sought out funerals as other men seek christenings. Widowhood and the grief of others attracted him, because of his great gentleness; he mingled with the friends clad in mourning, with families dressed in black, with the priests groaning around a coffin. He seemed to like to give to his thoughts for text these funereal psalmodies filled with the vision of the other world. With his eyes fixed on heaven, he listened with a sort of aspiration towards all the mysteries of the infinite, those sad voices which sing on the verge of the obscure abyss of death.

He performed a multitude of good actions, concealing his agency in them as a man conceals himself because of evil actions. He penetrated houses privately, at night; he ascended staircases furtively. A poor wretch on returning to his attic would find that his door had been opened, sometimes even forced, during his absence. The poor man made a clamor over it: some malefactor had been there! He entered, and the first thing he beheld was a piece of gold lying forgotten on some piece of furniture. The "malefactor" who had been there was Father Madeleine.

He was affable and sad. The people said: "There is a rich man who has not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air."

Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite's cell, furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and skulls of dead men!

This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked: "Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a grotto." He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this "grotto." They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see nothing remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern which stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, "for they were hall-marked," an observation full of the type of wit of petty towns.

Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the room, and that it was a hermit's cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a tomb.

It was also whispered about that he had "immense" sums deposited with Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his appearance at Laffitte's any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, "these two or three millions" were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs.

At the beginning of 1820 the newspapers announced the death of M. Myriel, Bishop of D-, and surnamed "Monseigneur Bienvenu," who had died in the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.

The Bishop of D- -to supply here a detail which the papers omitted- had been blind for many years before his death, and content to be blind, as his sister was beside him.

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the Centre of these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates,-few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake-let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly, and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in one's arms,-God made tangible,-what bliss! The heart, that obscure, celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming.

One would not exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there, uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality.

One feels warmth approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul. One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of shadows.

It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the other.

The announcement of his death was reprinted by the local journal of M. sur M. On the following day, M. Madeleine appeared clad wholly in black, and with crape on his hat.

This mourning was noticed in the town, and commented on. It seemed to throw a light on M. Madeleine's origin. It was concluded that some relationship existed between him and the venerable Bishop. "He has gone into mourning for the Bishop of D-" said the drawing-rooms; this raised M. Madeleine's credit greatly, and procured for him, instantly and at one blow, a certain consideration in the noble world of M. sur M. The microscopic Faubourg Saint-Germain of the place meditated raising the quarantine against M. Madeleine, the probable relative of a bishop. M. Madeleine perceived the advancement which he had obtained, by the more numerous courtesies of the old women and the more plentiful smiles of the young ones. One evening, a ruler in that petty great world, who was curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask him, "M. le Maire is doubtless a cousin of the late Bishop of D-?"

He said, "No, Madame."

"But," resumed the dowager, "you are wearing mourning for him."

He replied, "It is because I was a servant in his family in my youth." You see, M. Madeleine had a past none knew about. If a single soul knew his past, he would be put back into chains.

You see, Monsieur Madeleine was once known as Prisoner 24601, also known as Jean Valjean. He had truly defied fate, and now looks where he was. And it was all because of the Bishop Myriel.

Another thing which was remarked, was, that every time that he encountered in the town a young Savoyard who was roaming about the country and seeking chimneys to sweep, the mayor had him summoned, inquired his name, and gave him money. The little Savoyards told each other about it: a great many of them passed that way.

Little by little, and in the course of time, all this opposition subsided. There had at first been exercised against M. Madeleine, in virtue of a sort of law which all those who rise must submit to, blackening and calumnies; then they grew to be nothing more than ill-nature, then merely malicious remarks, then even this entirely disappeared; respect became complete, unanimous, cordial, and towards 1821 the moment arrived when the word "Monsieur le Maire" was pronounced at M. sur M. with almost the same accent as "Monseigneur the Bishop" had been pronounced in D- in 1815. People came from a distance of ten leagues around to consult M. Madeleine. He put an end to differences, he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. Every one took him for the judge, and with good reason. It seemed as though he had for a soul the book of the natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole district.

One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct kept him on the alert and uneasy. It seems, in fact, as though there existed in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and upright, like all instincts, which creates antipathies and sympathies, which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace, and which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible, imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence and to all the dissolvent of reason, and which, in whatever manner destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.

It frequently happened that when M. Madeleine was passing along a street, calm, affectionate, surrounded by the blessings of all, a man of lofty stature, clad in an iron-gray frock-coat, armed with a heavy cane, and wearing a battered hat, turned round abruptly behind him, and followed him with his eyes until he disappeared, with folded arms and a slow shake of the head, and his upper lip raised in company with his lower to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be translated by: "What is that man, after all? I certainly have seen him somewhere. In any case, I am not his dupe."

This person, grave with a gravity which was almost menacing, was one of those men who, even when only seen by a rapid glimpse, arrest the spectator's attention.

His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.

At M. sur M. he exercised the unpleasant but useful functions of an inspector. He had not seen Madeleine's beginnings. Javert owed the post which he occupied to the protection of M. Chabouillet, the secretary of the Minister of State, Comte Angeles, then prefect of police at Paris. When Javert arrived at M. sur M. the fortune of the great manufacturer was already made, and Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.

Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority. Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man. Sometimes even several of them at a time.

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains.

This, be it said, is of course from the restricted point of view of the terrestrial life which is apparent, and without prejudging the profound question of the anterior or ulterior personality of the beings which are not man. The visible _I_ in nowise authorizes the thinker to deny the latent _I_. Having made this reservation, let us pass on.

Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.

The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.

Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be Javert.

Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,- those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an inspector.

During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of the South.

Before proceeding further, let us come to an understanding as to the words, "human face," which we have just applied to Javert.

The human face of Javert consisted of a flat nose, with two deep nostrils, towards which enormous whiskers ascended on his cheeks. One felt ill at ease when he saw these two forests and these two caverns for the first time. When Javert laughed,-and his laugh was rare and terrible,-his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth, but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast. Javert, serious, was a watchdog; when he laughed, he was a tiger. As for the rest, he had very little skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.

This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments, comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating them,-respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes, murder, robbery, all crimes, and are only forms of rebellion. He enveloped in a blind and profound faith everyone who had a function in the state, from the prime minister to the rural policeman. He covered with scorn, aversion, and disgusts everyone who had once crossed the legal threshold of evil. He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand, he said, "The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate is never the wrong." On the other hand, he said, "These men are irremediably lost. Nothing good can come from them." He fully shared the opinion of those extreme minds which attribute to human law I know not what power of making, or, if the reader will have it so, of authenticating, demons, and who place a Styx at the base of society. He was stoical, serious, and austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, likes fanatics. His glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing. His whole life hung on these two words: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world; he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe to the man who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father, if the latter had escaped from the galleys, and would have denounced his mother, if she had broken her ban. And he would have done it with that sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue. And, withal, a life of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never a diversion. It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.

Javert's whole person was expressive of the man who spies and who withdraws himself from observation. The mystical school of Joseph de Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned with lofty cosmogony those things which were called the ultra-newspapers, would not have failed to declare that Javert was a symbol. His brow was not visible; it disappeared beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves: and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat. But when the occasion presented itself, there was suddenly seen to emerge from all this shadow, as from an ambuscade, a narrow and angular forehead, a baleful glance, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous cudgel.

In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate. This could be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.

As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself, he permitted himself a pinch of snuff. Therein lay his connection with humanity.

The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert routed them by its mere utterance; the face of Javert petrified them at sight.

Such was this formidable man.

Javert was like an eye constantly fixed on M. Madeleine. An eye full of suspicion and conjecture. M. Madeleine had finally perceived the fact; but it seemed to be of no importance to him. He did not even put a question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it. He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the world.

It was divined, from some words which escaped Javert, that he had secretly investigated, with that curiosity which belongs to the race, and into which there enters as much instinct as will, all the anterior traces which Father Madeleine might have left elsewhere. He seemed to know, and he sometimes said in covert words, that someone had gleaned certain information in a certain district about a family which had disappeared. Once he chanced to say, as he was talking to himself, "I think I have him!" Then he remained pensive for three days, and uttered not a word. It seemed that the thread which he thought he held had broken.

Moreover, and this furnishes the necessary corrective for the too absolute sense which certain words might present, there can be nothing really infallible in a human creature, and the peculiarity of instinct is that it can become confused, thrown off the track, and defeated. Otherwise, it would be superior to intelligence, and the beast would be found to be provided with a better light than man.

Javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by the perfect naturalness and tranquility of M. Madeleine.

One day, nevertheless, his strange manner appeared to produce an impression on M. Madeleine. It was on the following occasion.

One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley of M. sur M.; he heard a noise, and saw a group some distance away. He approached. An old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart, his horse having tumbled down.

This Fauchelevent was one of the few enemies whom M. Madeleine had at that time. When Madeleine arrived in the neighborhood, Fauchelevent, an ex-notary and a peasant who was almost educated, had a business which was beginning to be in a bad way. Fauchelevent had seen this simple workman grow rich, while he, a lawyer, was being ruined. This had filled him with jealousy, and he had done all he could, on every occasion, to injure Madeleine. Then bankruptcy had come; and as the old man had nothing left but a cart and a horse, and neither family nor children, he had turned carter.

The horse had two broken legs and could not rise. The old man was caught in the wheels. The fall had been so unlucky that the whole weight of the vehicle rested on his breast. The cart was quite heavily laden. Father Fauchelevent was rattling in the throat in the most lamentable manner. They had tried, but in vain, to drag him out. An unmethodical effort, aid awkwardly given, a wrong shake, might kill him. It was impossible to disengage him otherwise than by lifting the vehicle off of him. Javert, who had come up at the moment of the accident, had sent for a jack-screw.

M. Madeleine arrived. People stood aside respectfully.

"Help!" cried old Fauchelevent. "Who will be good and save the old man?"

M. Madeleine turned towards those present.

"Is there a jack-screw to be had?"

"One has been sent for," answered the peasant.

"How long will it take to get it?"

"They have gone for the nearest, to Flachot's place, where there is a farrier; but it makes no difference; it will take a good quarter of an hour."

"A quarter of an hour!" exclaimed Madeleine.

It had rained on the preceding night; the soil was soaked.

The cart was sinking deeper into the earth every moment, and crushing the old carter's breast more and more. It was evident that his ribs would be broken in five minutes more.

"It is impossible to wait another quarter of an hour," said Madeleine to the peasants, who were staring at him.

"We must!"

"But it will be too late then! Don't you see that the cart is sinking?"

"Well!"

"Listen," resumed Madeleine; "there is still room enough under the cart to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back. Only half a minute, and the poor man can be taken out. Is there any one here who has stout loins and heart? There are five louis d'or to be earned!"

Not a man in the group stirred.

"Ten louis," said Madeleine.

The persons present dropped their eyes. One of them muttered, "A man would need to be devilish strong. And then he runs the risk of getting crushed!"

"Come," began Madeleine again, "twenty louis."

The same silence.

"It is not the will which is lacking," said a voice.

M. Madeleine turned round, and recognized Javert. He had not noticed him on his arrival.

Javert went on,

"It is strength. One would have to be a terrible man to do such a thing as lift a cart like that on his back."

Then, gazing fixedly at M. Madeleine, he went on, emphasizing every word that he uttered,

"Monsieur Madeleine, I have never known but one man capable of doing what you ask."

Madeleine shuddered.

Javert added, with an air of indifference, but without removing his eyes from Madeleine,

"He was a convict."

"Ah!" said Madeleine.

"In the galleys at Toulon."

Madeleine turned pale.

Meanwhile, the cart continued to sink slowly. Father Fauchelevent rattled in the throat, and shrieked,

"I am strangling! My ribs are breaking! A screw! Something! Ah!"

Madeleine glanced about him.

"Is there, then, no one who wishes to earn twenty louis and save the life of this poor old man?"

No one stirred. Javert resumed, "I have never known but one man who could take the place of a screw, and he was that convict."

"Ah! It is crushing me!" cried the old man.

Madeleine raised his head, met Javert's falcon eye still fixed upon him, looked at the motionless peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.

A terrible moment of expectation and silence ensued.

They beheld Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrible weight, make two vain efforts to bring his knees and his elbows together. They shouted to him, "Father Madeleine, come out!" Old Fauchelevent himself said to him, "Monsieur Madeleine, go away! You see that I am fated to die! Leave me! You will get yourself crushed also!" Madeleine made no reply.

All the spectators were panting. The wheels had continued to sink, and it had become almost impossible for Madeleine to make his way from under the vehicle.

Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver; the cart raised slowly, the wheels half emerged from the ruts. They heard a stifled voice crying, "Make haste! Help!" It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort.

They rushed forwards. The devotion of a single man had given force and courage to all. The cart was raised by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was saved.

Madeleine rose. He was pale, though dripping with perspiration. His clothes were torn and covered with mud. All wept. The old man kissed his knees and called him the good God. As for him, he bore upon his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial suffering, and he fixed his tranquil eye on Javert, who was still staring at him.

Fauchelevent had dislocated his kneepan in his fall. Father Madeleine had him conveyed to an infirmary which he had established for his workmen in the factory building itself, and which was served by two sisters of charity. On the following morning the old man found a thousand-franc bank-note on his night-stand, with these words in Father Madeleine's writing: "I purchase your horse and cart." The cart was broken, and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered, but his knee remained stiff. M. Madeleine, on the recommendation of the sisters of charity and of his priest, got the good man a place as gardener in a female convent in the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris.

Sometime afterwards, M. Madeleine was appointed mayor. The first time that Javert beheld M. Madeleine clothed in the scarf which gave him authority over the town, he felt the sort of shudder which a watch-dog might experience on smelling a wolf in his master's clothes. From that time forth he avoided him as much as he possibly could. When the requirements of the service imperatively demanded it, and he could not do otherwise than meet the mayor, he addressed him with profound respect.

This prosperity created at M. sur M. by Father Madeleine had, besides the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives. When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the state nothing. It may be said, that there is one infallible thermometer of the public misery and riches,-the cost of collecting the taxes. In the course of seven years the expense of collecting the taxes had diminished three-fourths in the arrondissement of M. sur M., and this led to this arrondissement being frequently cited from all the rest by M. de Villele, then Minister of Finance.

Such was the condition of the country when Fantine returned thither. No one remembered her. Fortunately, the door of M. Madeleine's factory was like the face of a friend. She presented herself there, and was admitted to the women's workroom. The trade was entirely new to Fantine; she could not be very skillful at it, and she therefore earned but little by her day's work; but it was sufficient; the problem was solved; she was earning her living.

When Fantine saw that she was making her living, she felt joyful for a moment. To live honestly by her own labor, what mercy from heaven! The taste for work had really returned to her. She bought a looking-glass, took pleasure in surveying in it her youth, her beautiful hair, her fine teeth; she forgot many things; she thought only of Cosette and of the possible future, and was almost happy. She hired a little room and furnished on credit on the strength of her future work-a lingering trace of her improvident ways. As she was not able to say that she was married she took good care, as we have seen, not to mention her little girl.

At first, as the reader has seen, she paid the Thénardiers promptly. As she only knew how to sign her name, she was obliged to write through a public letter-writer.

She wrote often, and this was noticed. It began to be said in an undertone, in the women's workroom, that Fantine "wrote letters" and that "she had ways about her."

There is no one for spying on people's actions like those who are not concerned in them. Why does that gentleman never come except at nightfall? Why does Mr. So-and-So never hang his key on its nail on Tuesday? Why does he always take the narrow streets? Why does Madame always descend from her hackney-coach before reaching her house? Why does she send out to purchase six sheets of note paper, when she has a "whole stationer's shop full of it?" etc. There exist beings who, for the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time, take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other payment for their curiosity than curiosity. They will follow up such and such a man or woman for whole days; they will do sentry duty for hours at a time on the corners of the streets, under alley-way doors at night, in cold and rain; they will bribe errand-porters, they will make the drivers of hackney-coaches and lackeys tipsy, buy a waiting-maid, suborn a porter. Why? For no reason. A pure passion for seeing, knowing, and penetrating into things. A pure itch for talking. And often these secrets once known, these mysteries made public, these enigmas illuminated by the light of day, bring on catastrophes, duels, failures, the ruin of families, and broken lives, to the great joy of those who have "found out everything," without any interest in the matter, and by pure instinct. A sad thing.

Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking. Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by their neighbors.

So Fantine was watched.

In addition, many a one was jealous of her golden hair and of her white teeth.

It was remarked that in the workroom she often turned aside, in the midst of the rest, to wipe away a tear. These were the moments when she was thinking of her child; perhaps, also, of the man whom she had loved.

Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.

It was observed that she wrote twice a month at least, and that she paid the carriage on the letter. They managed to obtain the address: Monsieur, Monsieur Thenardier, inn-keeper at Montfermeil. The public writer, a good old man who could not fill his stomach with red wine without emptying his pocket of secrets, was made to talk in the wine-shop. In short, it was discovered that Fantine had a child. "She must be a pretty sort of a woman." An old gossip was found, who made the trip to Montfermeil, talked to the Thénardiers, and said on her return: "For my five and thirty francs I have freed my mind. I have seen the child."

The gossip who did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age. A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been young-astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, sharp, captious, almost venomous; all this in memory of her monk, whose widow she was, and who had ruled over her masterfully and bent her to his will. She was a nettle in which the rustle of the cassock was visible. At the Restoration she had turned bigot, and that with so much energy that the priests had forgiven her monk. She had a small property, which she bequeathed with much ostentation to a religious community. She was in high favor at the episcopal palace of Arras. So this Madame Victurnien went to Montfermeil, and returned with the remark, "I have seen the child."

All this took time. Fantine had been at the factory for more than a year, when, one morning, the superintendent of the workroom handed her fifty francs from the mayor, told her that she was no longer employed in the shop, and requested her, in the mayor's name, to leave the neighborhood.

This was the very month when the Thénardiers, after having demanded twelve francs instead of six, had just exacted fifteen francs instead of twelve.

Fantine was overwhelmed. She could not leave the neighborhood; she was in debt for her rent and furniture. Fifty francs was not sufficient to cancel this debt. She stammered a few supplicating words. The superintendent ordered her to leave the shop on the instant. Besides, Fantine was only a moderately good workwoman. Overcome with shame, even more than with despair, she quitted the shop, and returned to her room. So her fault was now known to everyone.

She no longer felt strong enough to say a word. She was advised to see the mayor; she did not dare. The mayor had given her fifty francs because he was good, and had dismissed her because he was just. She bowed before the decision.

Madame Victurnien finally had done the worst to Fantine. Fantine lost her jobs within the wintertime, and her debts began to increase slowly but surely.

Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thénardiers, who were not promptly paid, wrote to her constantly letters whose contents drove her to despair, and whose carriage ruined her. One day they wrote to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather, that she needed a woolen skirt, and that her mother must send at least ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber's shop at the corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair fell to her knees.

"What splendid hair!" exclaimed the barber. His beady eyes were eyeing it with want, she knew he would buy it for the right amount.

"How much will you give me for it?" She asked, hopeful to gain more francs, she needed as much as she could get to pay for Cosette.

"Ten francs." The barber said finally, and Fantine knew that was as much as she was going to get.

"Cut it off." She said, and closed her eyes as she heard the snipping sound. Locks of hair drifted to the ground, but it was worth it in the end.

She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Thénardiers. This petticoat made the Thénardiers furious. It was the money that they wanted. They gave the petticoat to Isabella Éponine. Isabella loved it, and continued to stay warm. The poor Lark continued to shiver.

Fantine thought: "My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my hair." She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head, and in which she was still pretty.

Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine's heart.

When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate every one about her. She had long shared the universal veneration for Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he who had discharged her, that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she came to hate him also, and most of all. When she passed the factory in working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to laugh and sing.

An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion said, "There's a girl who will come to a bad end."

She took a lover, the first who offered, and a man whom she did not love, out of bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a miserable scamp, a sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.

She adored her child.

The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart. She said, "When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;" and she laughed. Her cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.

One day she received from the Thénardiers a letter couched in the following terms: "Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the rounds of the neighborhood. A miliary fever, they call it. Expensive drugs are required. This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them any longer. If you do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the little one will be dead, so if you truly care, send us the francs."

She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: "Ah! They are good! Forty francs! The idea! That makes two napoleons! Where do they think I am to get them? These peasants are stupid, truly."

Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the letter once more. Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running and leaping and still laughing.

Someone met her and said to her, "What makes you so gay?"

She replied: "A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have written to me. They demand forty francs of me. So much for you, you peasants!"

As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and elixirs.

Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for respectable people. The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl, and suddenly exclaimed: "You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a gold napoleon apiece for them."

"What are my palettes?" asked Fantine.

"The palettes," replied the dental professor, "are the front teeth, the two upper ones."

"How horrible!" exclaimed Fantine. She was terrified at the prospect of losing the teeth she had paid for. But she was troubled, she could be selfish, or give the money for her dear Cosette.

"Two napoleons!" grumbled a toothless old woman who was present. "Here's a lucky girl!"

Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse voice of the man shouting to her: "Reflect, my beauty! Two napoleons; they may prove of service. If your heart bids you, come this evening to the inn of the Tillac d'Argent; you will find me there."

Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to her good neighbor Marguerite: "Can you understand such a thing? Is he not an abominable man? How can they allow such people to go about the country! Pull out my two front teeth! Why, I should be horrible! My hair will grow again, but my teeth! Ah! What a monster of a man! I should prefer to throw myself head first on the pavement from the fifth story! He told me that he should be at the Tillac d'Argent this evening."

"And what did he offer?" asked Marguerite.

"Two napoleons." Fantine replied vaguely, considering her options.

"That makes forty francs." Marguerite said, doing the math within her head.

"Yes," said Fantine; "that makes forty francs."

She remained thoughtful, and began her work. At the expiration of a quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to read the Thénardiers' letter once more on the staircase. She was plagu

ed by the words written in it, she only wanted her daughter to survive.

On her return, she said to Marguerite, who was at work beside her.

"What is a miliary fever? Do you know?" She questioned curiously, hoping for somewhat good news.

"Yes," answered the old spinster; "it is a disease."

"Does it require many drugs?" Fantine continued, trying to prove the Thénardiers' letter.

"Oh! Terrible drugs." Marguerite said and her eyes went wide at the mere thought of them.

"How does one get it?" She continued.

"It is a malady that one gets without knowing how."

"Then it attacks children?"

"Children in particular." Marguerite had confirmed her first fear. Now it was time to see of her worst fear would be confirmed.

"Do people die of it?"

"They may," said Marguerite.

Fantine left the room and went to read her letter once more on the staircase. She made her decision right there and then.

That evening she went out, and was seen to turn her steps in the direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are situated.

The next morning, when Marguerite entered Fantine's room before daylight, for they always worked together, and in this manner used only one candle for the two, she found Fantine seated on her bed, pale and frozen. She had not lain down. Her cap had fallen on her knees. Her candle had burned all night, and was almost entirely consumed. Marguerite halted on the threshold, petrified at this tremendous wastefulness, and exclaimed,

"Lord! The candle is all burned out! Something has happened."

Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her, her head bereft of its hair.

Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.

"Jesus!" said Marguerite, "what is the matter with you, Fantine?"

"Nothing," replied Fantine. "Quite the contrary. My child will not die of that frightful malady, for lack of succor. I am content."

So saying, she pointed out to the spinster two napoleons which were glittering on the table.

"Ah! Jesus God!" cried Marguerite. "Why, it is a fortune! Where did you get that louis d'or?"

"I got them," replied Fantine.

At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance. It was a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips, and she had a black hole in her mouth.

The two teeth had been extracted, willingly. She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil, and hoped for the best.

After all it was a ruse of the Thénardiers to obtain money. Cosette was not ill at all, starving and cold, but not ill.

Fantine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since quitted her cell on the second floor for an attic with only a latch to fasten it, next the roof; one of those attics whose extremity forms an angle with the floor, and knocks you on the head every instant. The poor occupant can reach the end of his chamber as he can the end of his destiny, only by bending over more and more.

She had no longer a bed; a rag which she called her coverlet, a mattress on the floor, and a seat less chair still remained. A little rosebush which she had, had dried up, forgotten, in one corner. In the other corner was a butter-pot to hold water, which froze in winter, and in which the various levels of the water remained long marked by these circles of ice. She had lost her shame; she lost her coquetry. A final sign. She went out, with dirty caps. Whether from lack of time or from indifference, she no longer mended her linen. As the heels wore out, she dragged her stockings down into her shoes. This was evident from the perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her bodice, which was old and worn out, with scraps of calico which tore at the slightest movement. The people to whom she was indebted made "scenes" and gave her no peace. She found them in the street; she found them again on her staircase. She passed many a night weeping and thinking. Her eyes were very bright, and she felt a steady pain in her shoulder towards the top of the left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. She deeply hated Father Madeleine, but made no complaint. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but a contractor for the work of prisons, who made the prisoners work at a discount, suddenly made prices fall, which reduced the daily earnings of working-women to nine sous. Seventeen hours of toil, and nine sous a day! Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The second-hand dealer, who had taken back nearly all his furniture, said to her incessantly, "When will you pay me, you hussy?" What did they want of her, good God! She felt that she was being hunted, and something of the wild beast developed in her. About the same time, Thénardier wrote to her that he had waited with decidedly too much amiability and that he must have a hundred francs at once; otherwise he would turn little Cosette out of doors, convalescent as she was from her heavy illness, into the cold and the streets, and that she might do what she liked with herself, and die if she chose. "A hundred francs," thought Fantine. "But in what trade can one earn a hundred sous a day?"

"Come!" said she, "let us sell what is left."

The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.

Fantine became a prostitute; she had no other options left. She disliked what she had become, but must be done.

Those who had paid for her often called her emotionless, and cold to touch. But they still paid for her, and Fantine could pay for her darling Cosette.

This night was no different, with the man leaving her in the bed. Fantine began to sing softly to herself, as if it were her only comfort.

"There was a time when men were kind, and when their voices were soft. And their words inviting….There was a time when love was blind, and the world was a song, and the song was exciting. There was a time, and then it all went wrong."

Fantine remembered those days when she was a mere child. Her parents had disowned her after she went with Félix Tholomyès, and left her to care for her child Cosette alone.

"I dreamed a dream in times gone by. When hope was high, and life worth living. I dreamed that love would never die; I dreamed that God would be forgiving. Then I was young and unafraid, and dreams were made and used and wasted. There was no ransom to be paid, no song unsung, no wine untasted." Fantine took another deep breath, before continuing, "But the tigers come at night with their voices soft as thunder.

As they tear your hope apart, and they turn your dream to shame. He slept a summer by my side. He filled my days with endless wonder. .He took my childhood in his stride, but he was gone when autumn came!" Fantine was now referring to Félix Tholomyès, and the many men she was forced to have sex with.

"And still I dream he'll come to me, that we'll live the years together. But there are dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot weather. I had a dream my life would be, so different from this hell I'm living, so different now from what it seemed. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."

Fantine finished, and she felt the sobs racking down her body, and tears fell down her pale cheeks.

Her dream was over, and now she had to suffer from what is known as hell of Earth.


	3. Chapter 3

There was once a man known as Bamatabois. He was the source of one of Fantine's biggest and one of the final conflicts in her lifetime.

It was a January night, in 1823, and it was a snowy evening. Bamatabois wore a heavy cloak to keep warm, along with a fashionable outfit at the time, though modernly, it would have looked outlandish. It was evident he had wealth, though of his short, rat like face displeased many women. Many women were displeased by his looks, but still he continued his sinful actions, and often forced actions.

He stood in the town with a cigar in his mouth, enjoying the show occurring right before him. A woman of all low status passed by the man, and he commented snidely, "How ugly you are! Will you get out of my sight? You have no teeth!" He kept making these remarks as the woman passed by him, but she ignored him. She did not even glance in his direction.

The small effect which he produced no doubt piqued the lounger; and taking advantage of a moment when her back was turned, he crept up behind her with the gait of a wolf, and stifling his laugh, bent down, picked up a handful of snow from the pavement, and thrust it abruptly into her back, between her bare shoulders. Another handful was shoved down the delicate space of the woman's breasts, and that was enough to frustrate any woman.

The woman uttered a roar, whirled round, gave a leap like a panther, and hurled herself upon the man, burying her nails in his face, with the most frightful words which could fall from the guard-room into the gutter. These insults, poured forth in a voice roughened by brandy, did, indeed, proceed in hideous wise from a mouth which lacked its two front teeth. It was Fantine who the man insulted, and she was furious. She could often be compared to a wild cat, but with more human like characteristics.

The noise did not stop, and as a result, officers rushed out of a nearby pub, obviously drunk, but still sober enough to see what was disturbing the peace. They surrounded the fighting man and woman, and just then a man with a large figure emerged from the crowd.

"Come with me!" He ordered Fantine as she was ripped off of the man she was attacking. A now muddy and freezing Fantine looked up slowly, her gaze glassy, as she trembled in fear. She recognized the officer, it was the feared Javert.

Bamatabois took this moment to flee the scene, leaving the terrified Fantine in Javert's grasp. She trembled with brown eyes wide, as she watched Javert's emotionless face drag her away from the scene of her "crime".

Javert thrust aside the spectators, broke the circle, and set out with long strides towards the police station, which is situated at the extremity of the square, dragging the wretched woman after him. She yielded mechanically. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The cloud of spectators followed, jesting, in a paroxysm of delight. Supreme misery an occasion for obscenity, and many knew what was about to occur.

On arriving at the police station, which was a low room, warmed by a stove, with a glazed and grated door opening on the street, and guarded by a detachment, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and shut the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who raised themselves on tiptoe, and craned their necks in front of the thick glass of the station-house, in their effort to see. Curiosity is a sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.

On entering, Fantine fell down in a corner, motionless and mute, crouching down like a terrified dog. She might as well have been considered one, or at least in the majority's eyes.

The sergeant of the guard brought a lighted candle to the table. Javert seated himself, drew a sheet of stamped paper from his pocket, and began to write furiously. Line after line of writing appeared, and Javert showed no sign of stopping any time soon.

This class of women is consigned by our laws entirely to the discretion of the police. The latter do what they please, punish them, as seems good to them, and confiscate at their will those two sorry things which they entitle their industry and their liberty. Javert was impassive; his grave face betrayed no emotion whatever. Nevertheless, he was seriously and deeply preoccupied. It was one of those moments when he was exercising without control, but subject to all the scruples of a severe conscience, his redoubtable discretionary power. At that moment he was conscious that his police agent's stool was a tribunal. He was entering judgment. He judged and condemned. He summoned all the ideas which could possibly exist in his mind, around the great thing which he was doing.

The more he examined the deed of this woman, the more shocked he felt. It was evident that he had just witnessed the commission of a crime. He had just beheld, yonder, in the street, society, in the person of a freeholder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature that was outside all pales. A prostitute had made an attempt on the life of a citizen. He had seen that, he, Javert. He wrote in silence, a silence he was used to by this point. Long hours in the work of the police force had done this to the man known as Javert.

When he had finished he signed the paper, folded it, and said to the sergeant of the guard, as he handed it to him, "Take three men and conduct this creature to jail." This was all he said to the man, who nodded and turned away to gather three men suitable for the job.

Then, turning to Fantine, "You are to have six months of it." The unhappy woman shuddered, thinking of her daughter, who for all she knew was dying of illness. Six months would be too long; there would be no way for her to provide for her darling Cosette!

"Six months! Six months of prison!" she exclaimed furiously, her pupils dilating in anger, and most of all, fear. "Six months in which to earn seven sous a day! But what will become of Cosette? My daughter! My daughter! But I still owe the Thénardiers over a hundred francs; do you know that, Monsieur Inspector?" Fantine's tone was pleading, and her dark eyes were wide and pleading. But Javert wouldn't take any of it.

She dragged herself across the damp floor, among the muddy boots of all those men, without rising, with clasped hands, and taking great strides on her knees. Her desperation was ignored, much to her despair. There was no hope in the damp police station, the aging grey stone walls providing no comfort in this situation.

"Monsieur Javert," said she, "I beseech your mercy. I assure you that I was not in the wrong. If you had seen the beginning, you would have seen. I swear to you by the good God that I was not to blame! That gentleman, the bourgeois, whom I do not know, put snow in my back. Has anyone the right to put snow down our backs when we are walking along peaceably, and doing no harm to any one? I am rather ill, as you see. And then, he had been saying impertinent things to me for a long time: `You are ugly! You have no teeth!' I know well that I have no longer those teeth. I did nothing; I said to me, `The gentleman is amusing himself.' I was honest with him; I did not speak to him. It was at that moment that he put the snow down my back. Monsieur Javert, good Monsieur Inspector! Is there not some person here who saw it and can tell you that this is quite true? Perhaps I did wrong to get angry after all! You know that one is not master of one's self at the first moment. One gives way to vivacity; and then, when someone puts something cold down your back just when you are not expecting it! I did wrong to spoil that gentleman's hat. Why did he go away? I would ask his pardon. Oh, my God! It makes no difference to me whether I ask his pardon. Do me the favor to-day, for this once, Monsieur Javert. Hold! you do not know that in prison one can earn only seven sous a day; it is not the government's fault, but seven sous is one's earnings; and just fancy, I must pay one hundred francs, or my little girl will be sent to me. Oh, my God! I cannot have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette! Oh, my little angel of the Holy Virgin! What will become of her, poor creature? I will tell you: it is the Thénardiers, inn-keepers, peasants; and such people are unreasonable. They want money. Don't put me in prison! You see, there is a little girl who will be turned out into the street to get along as best she may, in the very heart of the winter; and you must have pity on such a being, my good Monsieur Javert. If she were older, she might earn her living; but it cannot be done at that age. I am not a bad woman at bottom. It is not cowardliness and gluttony that have made me what I am. If I have drunk brandy, it was out of misery. I do not love it; but it benumbs the senses. When I was happy, it was only necessary to glance into my closets, and it would have been evident that I was not a coquettish and untidy woman. I had linen, a great deal of linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!"

She spoke thus, rent in twain, shaken with sobs, blinded with tears, her neck bare, wringing her hands, and coughing with a dry, short cough, stammering softly with a voice of agony. Great sorrow is a divine and terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy. At that moment Fantine had become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly kissed the police agent's coat. She would have softened a heart of granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened. Javert was ruthless, as he took his duty to the law very seriously. There was no going back for the man known as Javert, enforcer of the law. He had gone down a path, a path that he had assumed that pleased the Lord himself.

"Come!" said Javert, "I have heard you out for long enough. Have you entirely finished your rant yet? You will get six months in the jail. Now march, get out of here! The Eternal Father in person could do nothing more for you, wench."

At these solemn words, "the Eternal Father in person could do nothing more," she understood that her fate was sealed. She sank down, murmuring, "Mercy!" She continued her pleading cries, but they were lost in the air, never to be taken seriously.

Javert turned his back, ignoring Fantine's pleading cries to be let go that continued like a cried mantra, but were never heard.

The soldiers seized her by the arms roughly, and she wanted to cry out in pain as they surely bruised her arms.

A few moments earlier a man had entered, but no one had paid any heed to him. He shut the door, leaned his back against it, and listened to Fantine's despairing supplications.

At the instant when the soldiers laid their hands upon the unfortunate woman, who would not rise, he emerged from the shadow, and said, "One moment, if you please."

Javert raised his eyes and recognized M. Madeleine. He removed his hat, and, saluting him with a sort of aggrieved awkwardness, "Excuse me, Mr. Mayor-" He began, but was interrupted before he could actually continue.

The words "Mr. Mayor" produced a curious effect upon Fantine. She rose to her feet with one bound, like a specter springing from the earth, thrust aside the soldiers with both arms, walked straight up to M. Madeleine before anyone could prevent her, and gazing intently at him, with a bewildered air, she cried, "Ah! So it is you who are M. le Maire!"

Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face with a vengeance.

M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said, "Inspector Javert set this woman at liberty."

Javert felt that he was on the verge of going mad. He experienced at that moment, blow upon blow and almost simultaneously, the most violent emotions which he had ever undergone in all his life. To see a woman of the town spit in the mayor's face was a thing so monstrous that, in his most daring flights of fancy, he would have regarded it as a sacrilege to believe it possible. On the other hand, at the very bottom of his thought, he made a hideous comparison as to what this woman was, and as to what this mayor might be; and then he, with horror, caught a glimpse of I know not what simple explanation of this prodigious attack. But when he beheld that mayor, that magistrate, calmly wipe his face and say, "Set this woman at liberty," he underwent a sort of intoxication of amazement; thought and word failed him equally; the sum total of possible astonishment had been exceeded in his case. He remained mute out of shock and somewhat resentment.

The words had produced no less strange an effect on Fantine. She raised her bare arm, and clung to the damper of the stove, like a person who is reeling. Nevertheless, she glanced about her, and began to speak in a low voice, as though talking to herself,

"At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six months! Who said that? It is not possible that anyone could have said that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! All because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her work honestly! Then I could no longer earn enough, and all this misery followed. In the first place, there is one improvement which these gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief. After that I stamped on that gentleman's hat in front of the officers' cafe; but he had spoiled my whole dress with snow. We women have but one silk dress for evening wear. You see that I did not do wrong deliberately-truly, Monsieur Javert; and everywhere I behold women who are far more wicked than I, and who are much happier. O Monsieur Javert! It was you who gave orders that I am to be set free, was it not? Make inquiries, speak to my landlord; I am paying my rent now; they will tell you that I am perfectly honest. Ah! My God! I beg your pardon; I have unintentionally touched the damper of the stove, and it has made it smoke."

M. Madeleine listened to her with profound attention. While she was speaking, he fumbled in his waistcoat, drew out his purse and opened it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine, "How much did you say that you owed?"

Fantine, who was looking at Javert, only, turned towards him, "Was I speaking to you?"

Then, addressing the soldiers, "Say, you fellows, did you see how I spit in his face? Ah! You old wretch of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I'm not afraid of you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert. I am afraid of my good Monsieur Javert!"

So saying, she turned to the inspector again, "And yet, you see, Mr. Inspector, it is necessary to be just. I understand that you are just, Mr. Inspector; in fact, it is perfectly simple: a man amuses himself by putting snow down a woman's back, and that makes the officers laugh; one must divert themselves in some way; and we-well, we are here for them to amuse themselves with, of course! And then, you, you come; you are certainly obliged to preserve order, you lead off the woman who is in the wrong; but on reflection, since you are a good man, you say that I am to be set at liberty; it is for the sake of the little one, for six months in prison would prevent my supporting my child. `Only, don't do it again, you hussy!' Oh! I won't do it again, Monsieur Javert! They may do whatever they please to me now; I will not stir. But to-day, you see, I cried because it hurt me. I was not expecting that snow from the gentleman at all; and then as I told you, I am not well; I have a cough; I seem to have a burning ball in my stomach, and the doctor tells me, `Take care of yourself.' Here, feel, give me your hand; don't be afraid- it is here."

She no longer wept, her voice was caressing; she placed Javert's coarse hand on her delicate, white throat and looked smilingly at him.

All at once she rapidly adjusted her disordered garments, dropped the folds of her skirt, which had been pushed up as she dragged herself along, almost to the height of her knee, and stepped towards the door, saying to the soldiers in a low voice, and with a friendly nod,

"Children, Monsieur l'Inspecteur has said that I am to be released, and I am going."

She laid her hand on the latch of the door. One step more and she would be in the street.

Javert up to that moment had remained erect, motionless, with his eyes fixed on the ground, cast athwart this scene like some displaced statue, which is waiting to be put away somewhere.

The sound of the latch roused him. He raised his head with an expression of sovereign authority, an expression all the more alarming in proportion as the authority rests on a low level, ferocious in the wild beast, atrocious in the man of no estate.

"Sergeant!" he cried, "don't you see that that jade is walking off! Who bade you let her go?"

"I," said Madeleine, his tone firm and hard.

Fantine trembled at the sound of Javert's voice, and let go of the latch as a thief relinquishes the article which he has stolen. At the sound of Madeleine's voice she turned around, and from that moment forth she uttered no word, nor dared so much as to breathe freely, but her glance strayed from Madeleine to Javert, and from Javert to Madeleine in turn, according to which was speaking.

It was evident that Javert must have been exasperated beyond measure before he would permit himself to apostrophize the sergeant as he had done, after the mayor's suggestion that Fantine should be set at liberty. Had he reached the point of forgetting the mayor's presence? Had he finally declared to himself that it was impossible that any "authority" should have given such an order, and that the mayor must certainly have said one thing by mistake for another, without intending it? Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government, society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?

However that may be, when M. Madeleine uttered that word, I, as we have just heard, Police Inspector Javert was seen to turn toward the mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, and a look of despair, his whole body agitated by an imperceptible quiver and an unprecedented occurrence, and say to him, with downcast eyes but a firm voice,

"Mr. Mayor that cannot be."

"Why can this lovely woman's arrest be taken away?" said M. Madeleine, with a single eyebrow rose in wonders and doubt.

"This miserable woman has insulted a citizen." Javert protested, his hands clasped behind his back as he stood tall and proudly, like a true enforcer of the law.

"Inspector Javert," replied the mayor, in a calm and conciliating tone, "listen. You are an honest man, and I feel no hesitation in explaining matters to you. Here is the true state of the case: I was passing through the square just as you were leading this woman away; there were still groups of people standing about, and I made inquiries and learned everything; it was the townsman who was in the wrong and who should have been arrested by properly conducted police."

Javert retorted, "This wretch has just insulted Monsieur le Maire."

"That concerns me," said M. Madeleine. "My own insult belongs to me, I think. I can do what I please about it."

"I beg Monsieur le Maire's pardon. The insult is not to him but to the law." Javert was not going down without a fight.

"Inspector Javert," replied M. Madeleine, "the highest law is conscience. I have heard this woman; I know what I am doing."

"And I, Mr. Mayor, do not know what I see."

"Then content yourself with obeying."

"I am obeying my duty. My duty demands that this woman shall serve six months in prison."

M. Madeleine replied gently,

"Heed this well; she will not serve a single day."

At this decisive word, Javert ventured to fix a searching look on the mayor and to say, but in a tone of voice that was still profoundly respectful,

"I am sorry to oppose Monsieur le Maire; it is for the first time in my life, but he will permit me to remark that I am within the bounds of my authority. I confine myself, since Monsieur le Maire desires it, to the question of the gentleman. I was present. This woman flung herself on Monsieur Bamatabnois, who is an elector and the proprietor of that handsome house with a balcony, which forms the corner of the esplanade, three stories high and entirely of cut stone. Such things as there are in the world! In any case, Monsieur le Maire, this is a question of police regulations in the streets, and concerns me, and I shall detain this woman Fantine."

Then M. Madeleine folded his arms, and said in a severe voice which no one in the town had heard hitherto,

"The matter to which you refer is one connected with the municipal police. According to the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and sixty-six of the code of criminal examination, I am the judge. I order that this woman shall be set at liberty."

Javert ventured to make a final effort.

"But, Mr. Mayor-"

"I refer you to article eighty-one of the law of the 13th of December, 1799, in regard to arbitrary detention."

"Monsieur le Maire, permit me-"

"Not another word."

"But-"

"Leave the room," said M. Madeleine.

Javert received the blow erect, full in the face, in his breast, like a Russian soldier. He bowed to the very earth before the mayor and left the room.

Fantine stood aside from the door and stared at him in amazement as he passed.

Nevertheless, she also was the prey to a strange confusion. She had just seen herself a subject of dispute between two opposing powers. She had seen two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul, her child, in combat before her very eyes; one of these men was drawing her towards darkness, the other was leading her back towards the light. In this conflict, viewed through the exaggerations of terror, these two men had appeared to her like two giants; the one spoke like her demon, the other like her good angel. The angel had conquered the demon, and, strange to say, that which made her shudder from head to foot was the fact that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she abhorred, that mayor whom she had so long regarded as the author of all her woes, that Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had insulted him in so hideous a fashion, he had saved her! Had she, then, been mistaken? Must she change her whole soul? She did not know; she trembled. She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable, indescribable, which was joy, confidence and love, dawn in her heart.

When Javert had taken his departure, M. Madeleine turned to her and said to her in a deliberate voice, like a serious man who does not wish to weep and who finds some difficulty in speaking, "I have heard you. I knew nothing about what you have mentioned. I believe that it is true, and I feel that it is true. I was even ignorant of the fact that you had left my shop. Why did you not apply to me? But here; I will pay your debts, I will send for your child, or you shall go to her. You shall live here, in Paris, or where you please. I undertake the care of your child and yourself. You shall not work any longer if you do not like. I will give all the money you require. You shall be honest and happy once more. And listen! I declare to you that if all is as you say,-and I do not doubt it, you have never ceased to be virtuous and holy in the sight of God. Oh! Poor woman."

This was more than Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To leave this life of infamy. To live free, rich, happy, respectable with Cosette; to see all these realities of paradise blossom of a sudden in the midst of her misery. She stared stupidly at this man who was talking to her, and could only give vent to two or three sobs, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"

Her limbs gave way beneath her, she knelt in front of M. Madeleine, and before he could prevent her he felt her grasp his hand and press her lips to it.

Then she fainted at his feet. M. Madeleine sighed as he picked up the woman, who was surprisingly light, and then he had her placed into an infirmary promptly.

Fantine woke, but was severely ill. Every day she would ask, "When shall I see my darling Cosette?"

And M. Madeleine would always respond, "She is coming, and with Godspeed."

She still continued to weaken, as illness ravaged inside of her body. Fantine's days were obviously numbered, but no Cosette showed up within the weeks to come. Fantine began to get restless within her confines; she wanted to see her darling Cosette one more time, as the woman refused to believe she was dying from illness.

Finally, the doctor even asked M. Madeleine where this mystical child named Cosette was.

M. Madeleine said to the doctor, "Well?"

"Has she not a child which she desires to see?" said the doctor with a single raised eyebrow.

"Yes." M. Madeleine said vaguely, not wanting to truly interfere.

"Well! Make haste and get it here!" The doctor exclaimed as he motioned to the dying Fantine. "Her days are obviously numbered!"

M. Madeleine shuddered at the thought; this was going to be a tough task.

Fantine inquired, "What did the doctor say?"

M. Madeleine forced him to smile for her benefit.

"He said that your child was to be brought speedily. That that would restore your health."

"Oh!" she rejoined, "he is right! But what do those Thénardiers mean by keeping my Cosette from me! Oh! She is coming. At last I behold happiness close beside me!"

In the meantime Thénardier did not "let go of the child," and gave a hundred insufficient reasons for it. Cosette was not quite well enough to take a journey in the winter. And then, there still remained some petty but pressing debts in the neighborhood, and they were collecting the bills for them, etc., etc.

"I shall send someone to fetch Cosette!" said Father Madeleine. "If necessary, I will go myself." He promised gently to the dying woman in the bedside, who gave a weak smile to his efforts.

He wrote the following letter to Fantine's dictation, and made her sign it:

_"MONSIEUR THENARDIER,_

_You will deliver Cosette to this person._

_You will be paid for all the little things._

_I have the honor to salute you with respect._

_"FANTINE."_

The letter was sent, and they all awaited an answer from these elusive Thénardiers.

But the next day M. Madeleine was visited by an unexpected visitor. He sat in his study, when he heard the wooden door creak open. He glanced behind him, and his eyes widened as he saw Javert standing their solemnly.

Javert had his hat off, and at his chest. M. Madeleine feared the worst as he saw the grim expression on the officer's face. Had he been found out?

If any physiognomist who had been familiar with Javert, and who had made a lengthy study of this savage in the service of civilization, this singular composite of the Roman, the Spartan, the monk, and the corporal, this spy who was incapable of a lie, this unspotted police agent-if any physiognomist had known his secret and long-cherished aversion for M. Madeleine, his conflict with the mayor on the subject of Fantine, and had examined Javert at that moment, he would have said to himself, "What has taken place?" It was evident to any one acquainted with that clear, upright, sincere, honest, austere, and ferocious conscience, that Javert had but just gone through some great interior struggle. Javert had nothing in his soul which he had not also in his countenance. Like violent people in general, he was subject to abrupt changes of opinion. His physiognomy had never been more peculiar and startling. On entering he bowed to M. Madeleine with a look in which there was neither rancor, anger, nor distrust; he halted a few paces in the rear of the mayor's arm-chair, and there he stood, perfectly erect, in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with eyes cast down, and an expression which was half-way between that of a soldier in the presence of his officer and a criminal in the presence of his judge, until it should please the mayor to turn round. All the sentiments as well as all the memories which one might have attributed to him had disappeared. That face, as impenetrable and simple as granite, no longer bore any trace of anything but a melancholy depression. His whole person breathed lowliness and firmness and an indescribable courageous despondency.

"What do you need, Javert?" He asked after a moment, sounding annoyed, but he feared the worst still.

Javert remained silent for an instant as though collecting his ideas, then raised his voice with a sort of sad solemnity, which did not, however, preclude simplicity.

"I have a crime to declare. I have disgraced the uniform I wear, I have done you wrong. Let no forgiveness be shown! I mistook you for a convict, I made a false report." M. Madeleine raised an eyebrow, but he gulped. Javert had been on the right track, but believed to be wrong. This was a close shave.

"I have just found out they have caught the convict. This man claims not be him, but I knew we would catch the elusive Jean Valjean one day! Press charges, against me, if you wish." Javert looked down in shame, and M. Madeleine looked down, contemplating his options.

"You say this man refuses to acknowledge that he is this convict, Jean Valjean?" M. Madeleine asked, his tone somewhat worried. Javert nodded gravely, his eyes now downcast to the wooden floors below. "He shall go trial?" Another nod confirmed M. Madeleine's greatest fears. "Alright, but you are forgiven. No charges, it was a mere coincidence."

Javert looked astonished at this statement, but as he opened his mouth up to protest, Madeleine gave him a look, and it said not to protest against his decision.

"Thank you, Monsieur le Maire." He murmured as he turned and exited M. Madeleine's office with a rigid posture. M. Madeleine was left shaken as he stared at his open palms, debating over his options here.

Later that night, M. Madeleine returned from visiting Fantine's bedside with grave news from the nun sisters who were taking care of the sickened woman.

Fantine had less than a week, the illness within her ravaged from within her body, slowly but surely deteriorating the woman who had a strong spirit, and a strong will to back up with it.

"Who am I?" He muttered as he stared blankly at the candlesticks on the mahogany wood dresser in his large home. Conveniently, it was near the church, but that is not relevant to this tale.

The candlesticks symbolized an important part to M. Madeleine's life. Once, he was an innocent man who stole a loaf of bread from a bakery, all to feed his elder sister's malnourished children. He was caught, and was sentenced to be a slave. Numerous escape attempts later, he had managed to rack up 18-19 years' worth of jail time as a slave, and now it was paid off. He was given a parole sheet warning all of his true identity, but it didn't stop him. A kind bishop named Myriel gave him shelter, and the silver he had attempted to steal. Now, look where he was, wealthy, but living his life in fear of being caught.

"Why should I save his hide? Why should I right this wrong? When I have come so far, and struggled for so long?" M. Madeleine pondered as he stared out at the city of Montreuil in the nighttime. The city was still alive with people, and candle lights flickered all throughout the city.

"If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned!" M. Madeleine sighed as he put his head in his hands; all of this was so hard to determine what to do.

"I am the master of hundreds of workers. They all look to me! How can I abandon them? How would they live, if I am not free?"

Within a split second, M. Madeleine knew what he had to do. The trial was that night, and he was going to put his soul to eternal rest, in the path of the Lord.

The carriage awaited him outside, almost as if the elderly driver knew what the mayor's decision would be before he even announced it.

"Where to?" The aging old man grumbled as he glanced up at the mayor through the slits of his eyelids.

"The courthouse." A single white eyebrow rose at this, but the driver knew he was going to get paid, so he didn't bother to question it. "Alright then."

M. Madeleine climbed into the carriage, and watched as the scenery of the town went by. He relished the taste of freedom as the wind rushed at his face, creating a warm, yet freezing cold feeling within the ex-convict.

They reached the courthouse within the timespan of an hour, and M. Madeleine thanked the driver, giving him 30 francs, a rather hefty sum. He entered through the dark oak doors, and followed the sounds of voices.

"Who am I?" He muttered, and continued that mantra as he burst into the trail room. All eyes went upon the mayor, who knew it was too late to go back now. "WHO AM I?" He roared as he made it to the front of the room, where the innocent accused man stood wringing his hands in worry. With one glance, M. Madeleine knew this man resembled his former self, but wasn't. "I AM 24601!" He bellowed as he clasped his hands behind his back, and many in the courtroom looked at him in shock.

"Mr. Mayor," One of the judges came down from his stand. "You must be ill. Go home and rest, and let us take care of this criminal."

M. Madeleine- or shall we say Jean Valjean? – felt his heart sink, but nodded. "But please do pass on what I have said here to Javert. He truly would be interested to hear what I have to say."

The judge nodded, he was naïve about the relations of Jean Valjean and the mysterious Javert of law enforcement.

By the time Jean had returned home, it was near midnight. He immediately went to Fantine's bedside, as he only knew how much time he had left before she joined the deceased. He now knew Javert was going to be after him once he heard the news, so now he must hurry if he wanted to get all of his deeds done.

He entered the room to see Fantine reaching into the nonexistent air in front of her. "Cosette, my darling. Come to mother, come to me." She was whispering into the night now, as she had a delusional smile on her face. Jean's heart sank as he knew the ugly truth was rearing its head; Fantine was at her final moments.

As he walked over to the frail and dying woman, her once gentle and warm brown eyes snapped to his. "Where is she?!" She cried out, thrashing in the small bed she was contained to. "Where has she gone?" She sobbed as she had no more energy to continue her antics, and Fantine fell back into the bed. Jean Valjean embraced her and looked into her shining brown orbs, seeing the tears threatening to break loose off of the woman in front of him.

"Cosette is coming." He promised gently as he caressed her face, and Fantine seemed to be pleased by this answer. But their moment was interrupted.

"Valjean, at last, we see each other plain.'M'sieur le Mayor', you'll wear a different chain." It was the voice Jean Valjean dreaded the most, the deep tenor of Javert. Fantine's glossy, confused eyes drifted over to the officer, who scoffed at the sight of her in the bed.

"Before you say another word, Javert! Before you chain me up like a slave again, listen to me! There is something I must do. This woman leaves behind a suffering child! There is none but me who can intercede, in Mercy's name, three days are all I need. Then I'll return, I pledge my word. Then I'll return...!" Jean Valjean said as he gently placed a greatly confused Fantine down, who looked worried by this point.

"You must think me mad!" Javert sneered as he reached for the sword at his waist. "I've hunted you across the years! A man like you can never change! A man... such as you..."

Fantine was seized with a fit of trembling.

"My child!" she cried, "to go and fetch my child! She is not here, then! Answer me, sister; where is Cosette? I want my child! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire!"

Javert stamped his foot with impatience; he hated how foolish this woman was.

"And now there's the other one! Will you hold your tongue, you hussy? It's a pretty sort of a place where convicts are magistrates, and where women of the town are cared for like countesses! Ah! But we are going to change all that; it is high time!"

He stared intently at Fantine, and added, once more taking into his grasp Jean Valjean's cravat, shirt and collar, "I tell you that there is no Monsieur Madeleine and that there is no Monsieur le Maire. There is a thief, a brigand, a convict named Jean Valjean! And I have him in my grasp! That's what there is!"

Fantine raised herself in bed with a bound, supporting herself on her stiffened arms and on both hands: she gazed at Jean Valjean, she gazed at Javert, she gazed at the nun, she opened her mouth as though to speak; a rattle proceeded from the depths of her throat, her teeth chattered; she stretched out her arms in her agony, opening her hands convulsively, and fumbling about her like a drowning person; then suddenly fell back on her pillow.

Her head struck the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes.

She was dead.

"You have murdered that woman." Jean Valjean muttered quietly as he stared at Fantine's corpse, still displaying that same look of shock.

Men like me can never change; men like you can never change! No, 24601, my duty's to the law!" Javert exclaimed as his eyes shone with determination. He was so close to his dreams, and he could practically taste it on his tongue. It lit his senses on fire, and he could see red.

"You have no rights, come with me 24601. Now the wheel has turned around, Jean Valjean is nothing now! Dare you talk to me of crime, and the price you had to pay! Every man is born in sin, every man must choose his way! You know nothing of Javert, I was born inside a jail, I was born with scum like you, and I am from the gutter too!" Javert admitted as he fully unsheathed his swords, and began to try to slash Jean Valjean with the sword.

Jean Valjean was smart; after all, years as a slave had been somewhat beneficial. He pulled a stray piece of wood from the wall, and used it to block all of the sword strikes. Javert knew perfectly how to aim his slashes with precision, and this was an intense battle.

"Believe of me what you will!" Jean Valjean had shouted at the same exact time Javert had made his statement. "There is a duty that I'm sworn to do!" Now he talked about his oath to Fantine, he was going to respect her final wishes. "You know nothing of my life! All I did was steal some bread! You know nothing of the world; you would rather see me dead. But not before I see this justice done!"

"I am warning you Javert! I'm a stronger man by far! There is power in me yet! My race is not yet run! I am warning you Javert! There is nothing I won't dare, if I have to kill you here! I'll do what must be done!" Jean Valjean swore as he blocked another lethal strike, but Javert had won by this point. Jean was backed into a corner, and he had nowhere to run.

Javert smirked a lethal smile as he brought his sword up one final time, but Jean was too quick and intelligent. There was a window behind Jean Valjean, and he leaped backwards, and into the Seine River.

As he had said, Jean Valjean had a duty to do, and he wasn't going to give up so easily. Not even to the ruthless Javert, who would hunt him down to the ends of the Earth.

Valjean was going to find Cosette.

* * *

_**End of Chapter 3. **_

_**Translations: **_

_**Bourgeois: Adj. When pronounced "BOO-zhee" (soft-j sound like in French) refers to a quality of (sometimes mildly) snobby-without-realizing-it, upper-middle-class sensibilities. Usually associated with upper-middle-income white people, but not necessarily.**_

_**Monsieur: It is also a customary French title of respect and term of address for a French-speaking man, corresponding to such English titles as Mr. or sir.**_

_**M. Madeleine: Jean Valjean's alias, Monsieur Madeleine. **_

_**l'Inspecteur: French for inspector**_

_**Monsieur le Maire: French for Mr. Mayor**_

_**Montreuil: Commonly referred to as M. sur. M. throughout the novel Les Misérables. I am retaining that fact throughout this. A City in France. **_


	4. Chapter 4

_This is posted on all of my stories that have not been completed. _

_I'm discontinuing all stories I have put up so far on this site. I can't continue any further, I have no time anymore. I'm too busy with school work, my job, and suffering from a major depression that just keeps coming back to haunt me. _

_So I'm sorry everybody. Call me awful, or whatever you like, but I can't do this anymore. _

_Maybe I'll put stories up again one day, but not just today. Maybe it'll be in real life, maybe here. _

_If you would like to know information about the story endings, then just P.M. me. Or if you would like to adopt one of my stories, P.M. and let me know. Plagiarizing will not be tolerated with me, nor will anyone else would like it. _

_I'll see you all one day, in the distant future. _


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